Just imagine if the Iron Lady had got the big call wrong

Thatcherism must be understood in the context of the calamity that came before

I sense that the share price of Margaret Thatcher anecdotes is peaking, so I’m offloading some stock. Ten years ago, the great woman came to lunch with a group of Telegraph writers. Determined not to ask a sententious question about public policy, I instead blurted out: ‘Is there anything worth watching on television at the moment, Lady Thatcher?’

She fixed her fierce blue eyes on me, trying to remember who I was. (On a previous occasion, I had managed to thump her on the elbow while making an expansive point, and she has been wary in my presence ever since.) Then she softened. ‘We enjoy the Sunday evening programmes, dear, especially those stirring Methodist hymns. But we find that even they are becoming a little wishy-washy these days’.

It is often said that Margaret Thatcher had no small talk, but this is another way of saying that she took even the paltriest things very seriously. Applied to television, her earnestness was bathetic. Applied to the rescue of a great country, it was absolutely necessary.

Just as Churchill, a rotten peace-time politician, brought the qualities that were needed to a war, so Margaret Thatcher’s achievement cannot be divorced from the context of her times. During the 1970s, it felt as if Britain was finished. It is already hard to recall the sheer awfulness of that era: the strikes, the power-cuts, the three-day week, the prices and incomes policies, the double-digit inflation. As a 1978 headline in the Wall Street Journal put it: ‘So long, Great Britain, it was nice knowing you’.

To turn such a situation around required the single-mindedness that became Margaret Thatcher’s defining characteristic, and is the central theme of the film about her.

But here’s the thing: her single-mindedness, like Churchill’s, was placed at the service of a correct analysis of what needed to be done. He knew that there was no point in trying to compromise with Nazism; she that there was no point in trying to compromise with socialism.

Had she been wrong, but equally stiff-necked, she would have been a second Heath. The Grocer, if anything, was even more stubborn than the grocer’s daughter. He was certainly pricklier, more autocratic and more convinced of his indispensability. But because he got the big call wrong, he ended up edging ahead of Lord North to be our worst ever prime minister.

That’s the point about Lady T: not that she was single-minded, but that she was right. Right, for what it’s worth, about Wesley’s hymns and the milk-and-water quality of religious broadcasting; and right, too, about what it means to live as independent citizens in an independent country.